A network may interconnect various devices, including the interconnection of multiple personal media devices. The various media devices may be networked together in order to share data, increase convenience, and make fuller use of each element. For example, certain devices within a home may be connected together. In such an environment, there are multiple potential sources and users of streaming digital media content for audio, video, gaming, and other uses.
When transmitting a data stream, such as a media stream, through an interconnection network, it may be desirable to assign priorities to each class of packets that comprise the flow. During periods of congestion, the network infrastructure may drop packets due to buffer contention. In such operations, it is generally more desirable to drop packets in order of priority.
However, support for packet-level priorities is difficult to implement and not commonly available. A network infrastructure would generally be required to explicitly provide support for packet-level priorities in order to implement operations in, for example, a network of personal media devices. The complexity of implementation would make conventional processes impractical for network devices having limited resources. Further, conventional processes commonly limit the number of priority levels that are available, thus limiting the usefulness of the process if a large number of data types may be present in a data stream.